xxi, 676 pages ; 24 cm

Each of the 78 essays in this collection features the distinctive intellectual signature that marks all memorable writing: the presence of a lively mind at work. The essays are divided into three parts by type: personal, expository, and perusasive, and are arranged alphabetically within each part. This arrangement makes them easily retrievable and assignable in an unlimited number of ways without imposing a context within which they must be read. Classes can skip around the book unencumbered by top-heavy apparatus, use the selections to focus on different modes of writing, or do some of each.-Back cover

Includes index

Preface for Instructors -- Introduction For Students -- Establishing Identity -- “What’s Your Name, Girl?” / Maya Angelou -- My Father’s Life / Raymond Carver -- You’re short, besides! / Sucheng Chan -- Silent Dancing /Judith Ortiz Cofer -- A Clack of Tiny Sparks: Remembrances of a Gay Boyhood / Bernard Cooper -- On Keeping a Notebook / Joan Didion -- Learning to Read and Write / Frederick Douglass -- A Few Words about Breasts / Nora, Ephron -- I Write for Revenge against Reality / Francine du Plessix Gray -- Salvation / Langston Hughes -- How It Feels to Be colored Me / Zora Neale Hurston -- Race Without face / Edward iwata -- Growing Up Asian in AMERICA / Kesaya E.Noda -- Shooting an Elephant / George Orwell -- Split at the Root: An essay on Jewish identity / Adrienne Rich -- Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy / Judy Ruiz -- The Men We Carry in Our Minds / Scott Russekk Sanders -- Looking for Work / Gary Soto -- Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space / Brent Staples -- On Being Black and Middle Class /Shelby Steele -- Mother Tongue / Amy Tan -- Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self / Alice Walker -- Once More to the Lake / E.B. White -- Shaping Information -- The Silent Grandeur of the Grand Canyon / Diane Ackerman -- The Journey’s End / Wendell Berry -- Gossip / Sisella Bok -- The Language of Oppression / Hiag A. Bosmajian -- Why Women Smile / Amy Cunningham -- Seeing / Annie Dillars00 Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant / Gerald Early -- On Dumpster Diving / Lars Eighner -- More than just a Shrine: Paying Homage to the Ghosts of Ellis Island / May Gordon -- Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs / Stephen Jay Gould -- The Black and White Truth about Basketball / Jeff Greenfield -- Crack and the Box / Pete Hamill -- Effeminacy / Daniel R. Harris -- Beggaring Our Better Selves / Lynne Sharon Schwartz -- The World’s Biggest Membrane / Lewis Thomas -- A Weight that Women Carry. Sallie Tisdale -- The Damned Human Race / Mark Twain -- In Search of out mother’s Gardens / Alice Walker -- The Death of the Moth / Virginia Woolf -- Contending With Issues -- Stranger in the Village / James Baldwin -- Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet / Susan Brown miller -- Civility and Its Discontents / Leslie Epstein -- Blame It on Feminism / Susan Faludi -- A Well- regulated Militia / Paul Fussell -- Feminism: A Transformational Politic / Bell Hooks -- Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan / June Jordan -- On Seeing England for the First Time / Jamaica Kincaid -- Letter from Birmingham Jail / Martin Luther King Jr. -- distancing the Homeless / Jonathan Kozol-- The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House / Audre Lorde -- A Letter to Matthew, Nancy Mairs -- Broken treaties, Broken Promises / Little Rock Reed -- Toward an American Language / Richard Rodrigues -- What I saw at the Abortion / Richard Selzer -- Talking AIDS to Death / Randy Shilts -- Erotica vs. Pornography / Gloria Steinem -- A Modest Proposal / Jonathon Swift -- Civil Disobedience / Henry David Thoreau -- Race Matters / Cornel West -- The killing Game / Joy Williams -- The Writers -- Index of Authors and Titles

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews